Together with my colleagues of the austrian wide OER-working group we published our findings about „Recommendations for OER Integration in Austrian Higher Education“ at this year EADTU 2016 conference.Abstract:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are considered an important instrument to increase access and to facilitate the reuse of learning content. Educational institutions, especially those in Higher Education, play a crucial role in the production of OER, since they are the main producers of learning materials. To foster this production, a national strategy or at a least a national commitment to OER is necessary. Moreover, due to the very strict copyright law in Austria, this achievement is of high importance and necessity. In this publication, we will introduce recommendations for the integration of OER in all Higher Education institutions in Austria; these were developed by a national workgroup consisting of different stakeholders (government, library, funder, Higher Education and special interest groups). The overall aim is to achieve sustainability for the educational sector, especially with regard to the usage of learning materials by different lecturers as well as institutions. The cooperation among various stakeholders on different levels needs to be in the centre of all further efforts, which should be based upon six explicit requirements:

Mandatory commitment to OER

Establishment of a nationwide information platform for exchange and cooperation

Establishment of nationwide educational programmes for different stakeholders

Establishment of national OER badges

Targeted financial and structural promotion of OER

Establishment of OER strategies within each institution and as a comprehensive approach

Each requirement will be described in more detail and a roadmap will illustrate how OER can be successfully integrated at Higher Education institutions in the next ten years.

The paper deals with necessary requirements to implement MOOCs at European universities, by the example of Austria. As the respective general conditions and business environments are obviously different from the university system in the United States the analysis of advantages and obstacles of offering MOOCs is done from a local point of view including lecturers’ and students’ perspectives as well as necessary preconditions that have to be established by the universities and the government. Thereby, challenges in the fields of content creation, the supply of MOOCs, the assessment of knowledge and the development of business models are pointed out and discussed.

Reference: Kopp, M., Ebner, M., Dorfer-Novak, A. (2014) Introducing MOOCs to Middle European Universities – is it worth it to accept the challenge?, International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning, Vol. 2/3, pp. 46-52
[Link to full article (open access)]